Decarbonising countries

Decarbonising countries

Some countries have sustained greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions for at least 10 years. This is true for multiple metrics, including territorial GHG emissions, territorial CO2 emissions, consumption-based CO2 emissions, and territorial GHG emissions including LULUCF CO2.

The average annual rates of change differ by country (and metric). As does the length of transition - some countries already started reducing in the 1970s (such as the UK, Sweden), while others only in the past 10 years.

As shown in the individual plots by country, most reductions were made in the electricity and heat sub-sector.

24 countries have reduced CO2 and GHG emissions for longer than a decade


Caption:
Links:

Belgium

Bulgaria

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Germany

Denmark

Spain

Finland

France

United Kingdom

Greece

Hungary

Ireland

Italy

Jamaica

Macedonia, FYR

Netherlands

Portugal

Romania

Slovak Republic

Slovenia

Sweden

Ukraine

United States

Info

Authors

The following team compiled the emissions data from underlying sources, designed and carried out the analysis, and produced the figures:

  • William F. Lamb (IPCC AR6 WGIII Ch2), Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)
  • Jan C. Minx (IPCC AR6 WGIII Ch2), Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)
  • Niklas Döbbling, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following authors: Alaa Al Khourdajie, Julia Pongratz, Robbie Andrew, Thomas Wiedmann, Monica Crippa, Jos G.J. Olivier, Jo House, Maria Figueroa, Yamina Saheb, Raphael Slade, Suzana Kahn Ribeiro, Smail Khennas, Stephane de la Rue du Can, Igor Bashmakov, Josep G. Canadell, Piers M. Forster, Diego Guizzardi, Glen P. Peters, Andy Reisinger, Matthew Rigby, Marielle Saunois, Steven J. Smith, Efisio Solazzo, Hanqin Tian, Michael Grubb

Data sources

We use the EDGAR v6.0 database of greenhouse gas emissions, which covers all major anthropogenic emissions sources and has a time span of 1970 to 2019 (Crippa et al 2019). EDGAR includes CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion derived from International Energy Agency data (IEA), supplemented with CH4 and N2O emissions from forest and peat fires taken from the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED v4.1s; Van Der Werf et al 2017).

EDGAR does not include land-use, land-use change and forestry CO2 emissions and removals (LULUCF CO2 emissions). We therefore source these separately, using the average of three global bookkeeping models (Hansis et al 2015, Houghton and Nassikas 2017, Gasser et al 2020) in a convention established by the Global Carbon Project (Friedlingstein et al 2019). These include CO2 emissions from peat burning and draining from FAO and GFED.

Sector and region classification

We group greenhouse gas emissions sources into five sectors covering aspects of energy supply, including fossil fuel extraction, processing, transport and generation (energy systems sector), energy demand in final sectors (transport, buildings, and industry sectors), non-energy related process emissions (e.g. cement and Fgases within industry), and agriculture and LULUCF emissions (AFOLU). 27 further sub-sectors capture more detailed emissions trends.

Countries are grouped into regions following the IPCC AR6 WGIII classification based on geography and development status.

Global warming potentials

We use global warming potentials with a time horizon of 100 years (GWP100) to compare and aggregate different greenhouse gases. We use the latest GWP100 values with climate feedbacks from IPCC AR6 Working Group I, which are confidential until the release of the report in August 2021.

Data access

The data is published in an open access preprint, with the full detail on our sources and methods available:

[Note: a separate file with AR6 GWP100 values is available for IPCC authors on DM]